Anonymous hacks government site, distributes files

Cites suicide of hacktivist Aaron Swartz as 'line that has been crossed'

Published: 01/26/2013 at 11:05 AM

(ZDNET) — Hacktivist group Anonymous took control of the U.S. Sentencing Commission website Friday, January 25 in a new campaign called “Operation Last Resort.”

The first attack on the website was early Friday morning. The second – successful – attack came around 9pm PST that evening.

By 3am PST ussc.gov was down (it has since been dropped from the DNS), yet as of this writing the IP address (66.153.19.162) still returns the defaced site’s contents.

It appears that via the U.S. government website, Anonymous had distributed encrypted government files and left a statement on the website that de-encryption keys would be publicly released (thus releasing the as-yet unknown information held on the stolen files) if the U.S. government did not comply with Anonymous’ ultimatum demands for legal reform.